Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon.
You seem to have a common misconception: NASA only cancelled Constellation, which was a horribly overbudget and behind schedule program designed to build two new rockets which wouldn't have been able to take people to the Moon until sometime in the late 2030s. The newly announced program boosts NASA's budget, and places an emphasis on lowering the cost of spaceflight to LEO and building the technologies needed for sustainable beyond-Earth exploration.
In situ resource utilization (e.g. lunar ice extraction) is one of the new technologies emphasized in the new plans. The old Constellation plans largely defunded this kind of research, as the funds were needed to help prevent the rocket building from getting further behind schedule. The new plans call for a near-term in-space resource extraction demonstrator:
Projects selected as in-space, flagship demonstrations will be significant in scale, and offer high potential to demonstrate new capability and reduce the cost of future exploration missions. These missions will demonstrate such critical technologies as in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, and other next generation capabilities key to sustainably exploring deep space.
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate several Flagship Technology Demonstrators, each with an expected lifecycle cost in the $400 million to $1 billion range, over a lifetime of five years or less, with the first flying no later than 2014. In pursuit of these goals, international, commercial, and other government agency partners will be actively pursued as integrated team members where appropriate....
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate demonstration projects in the areas of in situ resource utilization (ISRU), autonomous precision landing and hazard avoidance, and advanced in-space propulsion, leading to demonstrations on either robotic precursor or flagship missions.
In Situ Resource Utilization: NASA will fund research in a variety of ISRU activities aimed at using lunar, asteroidal, and Martian materials to produce oxygen and extract water from ice reservoirs. A flight experiment to demonstrate lunar resource prospecting, characterization, and extraction will be considered for testing on a future Flagship Technology Demonstration or robotic precursor exploration mission. Concepts to produce fuel, oxygen, and water from the Martian atmosphere and from subsurface ice will also be explored.
NASA's plans also call for propellant depots in low-Earth orbit, and likely EML-1, a Lagrange point which allows relatively easy access to the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids, and Mars. Once lunar ice extraction is demonstrated and an EML-1 propellant depot is established, a natural progression is to have automated processing plants on the Moon produce H2 and O2 fuel from lunar ice, which can then get shipped up to the EML-1 depot making access to the inner solar system much easier. The old plan suppressed this sort of research in favor of in-house rocket-building, while the new plan enables sustainable space exploration.
Uh-oh. Anyone else just get serious Shuttle deja-vu? Though Constellation looked like crap to me too, but... well... isn't 'flagship technology demonstration' what the Shuttle could be charitably described as?
The Shuttle showed us is that it's a bad idea for a single vehicle to be BOTH your flagship technology demonstrator AND your sole operational vehicle. The new plan is to have many competing operational vehicles, while also doing flagship demonstrators. Also, the "flagship demonstrators" aren't space vehicles, but things like propellant depots, in-situ resource utilization, etc.
Project Dynasoar was nearly complete when they canceled it. It is probably they way we should have been going into LEO.
Coincidentally, the Air Force is getting ready to launch a vehicle to orbit which could be considered in many ways a spiritual successor to Dyna-Soar. I submitted an article about it yesterday (unfortunately rejected, but that's the way it goes sometimes), and have pasted the text below for the curious:
Air Force Spaceplane Preps For Launch
The US Air Force is currently preparing for the launch of the secretive X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) spaceplane; NASA had previously dropped the project in 2004 so it could devote more funds to the Constellation project. The reusable spaceplane is set to launch in April on top of a commercial Atlas V rocket, orbit for up to 270 days while testing a number of new technologies, reenter the atmosphere, then land on auto-pilot in California. The X-37 previously conducted drop tests and autonomous landing tests using the Scaled Composites White Knight carrier aircraft.
Errr, the article is about how canceling it is going to cost about as much to finish it.
False. The cost of "finishing" Constellation is estimated to be $100-$160 billion dollars from 2010 through 2020 (on top of the $9B or so already spent), at which point it wouldn't have even accomplished a lunar landing yet -- the Apollo-style landing would be in either early 2020s or late 2030s depending on whether you spent closer to the $100B or $160B. Most of these costs are for developing the Ares I and V rockets, and the Orion capsule.
This article is about how the cancellation costs may be higher than the anticipated $2.5B, but it'll still be quite a bit lower than $100-$160 billion.
It would be quite bad for NASA to continue the Constellation project, as it miserably fails to achieve any of the goals which were set forth for in the Vision for Space Exploration; the VSE is what Constellation was ostensibly designed to fulfill. From the 2004 VSE:
Goal and Objectives The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will: * Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond; * Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations; * Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and * Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
Let's look at these original goals one by one and compare them to Constellation vs. the new plan:
Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond
Constellation was pretty much the opposite of sustained and affordable, with costs constantly increasing and an ever-slipping deadline. Not only that, but Constellation's going overbudget resulted in the cancellation of many human and robotic projects which would have contributed to making exploration sustainable and affordable.
The new plan for NASA places sustainable and affordable exploration as its primary goals, allowing us to make steady progress towards expanding into the inner solar system, with key near-term development and in-space tests of technologies like propellant depots, cost-effective access to orbit, nuclear propulsion, lightweight manned modules, in situ resource utilization (asteroid/moon mining), and nuclear electric propulsion. All of these things were unfunded under the old plan.
Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations
According to the Augustine Committee's report, Constellation wouldn't have been able to even produce the Ares I (essentially an in-house duplicate of the existing Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9 rockets) by 2017-2019, which would have only been able to transport astronauts to the ISS several years after the ISS had splashed into the ocean. They wouldn't even be able to develop a lunar lander until "well into the 2030s, if ever," or the mid-2020s if NASA got a massive funding boost.
Under the new plan, IOC for several competing commercial crew vehicles is 2014/2015. The precise plan is still being formulated, but it's likely to involve propellant depots in low-Earth orbit and the EML-1 lagrange point in this decade, which makes the Moon (and near-Earth asteroids, and Phobos, and ultimately Mars) much easier to access for both robots and humans, using already-existing rockets.
Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration;
If you read through the documents which established Constellation, innovative technologies were deliberately excluded, as they didn't want to have to re-adapt the 15/20-year program if any of those technologies worked out differently than expected. Avoiding innovative kind of makes sense for short-term projects, but for a long-term project pretty much guarantees that your end product is going to
For those of you who've watched the Senate hearing video that QuantumG linked to, there's this rather bizarre part where Sen. Vitter (R-La) made some insinuations that Bolden wasn't actually involved in the planning, but it was all supposedly done by his deputy Lori Garver. The Orlando Sentinel has some follow-up on this, with sources reporting that ATK (one of the primary contractors on the Ares I rocket) had put up the Senator to make those attacks:
The attacks on NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver spearheaded by Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter during a hearing on Wednesday on the 2011 NASA budget have badly backfired, according to a range of sources.
Vitter accused Garver -- who was not present at the hearing -- of orchestrating the cancellation of Constellation. He also seemed to suggest that Garver was running the agency, and not Administrator Charlie Bolden. Bolden later called Vitter's comment "unfair."
Not only were administration outraged by Vitter's remarks but several female civil servants and women executives in aerospace companies who have known Garver for years felt compelled to send their complaints to senate staff Wednesday afternoon.
Several sources on the Hill, in industry and inside the Obama administration blame rocket maker ATK, the developer of the Ares I rocket first stage, for putting Vitter up to the attack. Sources say that complaints have been sent to ATK and so far there has been no response.
In the meantime, members of the Senate and the House said they were going to refrain from any further personal attacks as they move against the White House's proposed 2011 budget for the space agency.
Reader FleaPlus contributes related news about NASA's proposed funding for scientific payloads on commercial space flights, which would be a huge boon to researchers.
Well, to be more precise, it's actually the commercial suborbital flights. For the curious, here's the text of my submission the summary is referring to:
Suborbital Science Gets Boost From NASA
This past week NASA announced that it would provide $15M/year for 5 years (pending Congressional approval) for launching science payloads on commercial suborbital spacecraft, which provide a more cost-effective and productive way to perform many types of research. The announcement was made at the first Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, where a few hundred scientists and rocket builders gathered to get a better understanding of each others' needs and capabilities. In addition to space tourism flights, several companies, like John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic, are competing for the lucrative scientific market to fly payloads for fields like microgravity biology/chemistry, atmospheric science, astrophysics, and space technology tests.
Falcon 9 was developed with Human Ratings. The others were not. In fact, Falcon 9 may actually be the first LV designed with human launch being the biggest part of it in nearly 40 years.
Actually, when you consider that the Space Shuttle and Soyuz don't meet NASA's human-rating standards, one could potentially argue that the Falcon 9 will be the first human-rated rocket in the history of mankind.;)
Not only does it include the delivery vehicle (Dragon); but, the delivery vehicle is a pressurized cargo container that is rated to be safe for humans to enter and certified to autodock with the ISS... or will be once they're done certifying it.
Not only that, but NASA apparently insisted on a brand-new Dragon for each and every delivery, which increases the price quite a bit. SpaceX said "sure, if you insist," and is reusing each of the ISS cargo Dragons afterwards as DragonLabs.
Too bad they were not ready for launch 10 years ago. They could have called it the Millennium Falcon.
I think he's alluded in past interviews that the Millennium Falcon was one of the reasons he chose the name. He's also stated future plans for developing a "BFR" (Big F'ing Rocket) and "BFE" (Big F'ing Engine), a pretty obvious reference to the BFG. This seems to provide some pretty obvious proof that Elon Musk is a huge dork.
...is a friggin' sensationalist claim that has no place in science reporting, either on a primary site or on a news aggregation site. Should the first Falcon 9 fail, they will learn from it and launch better designs in the future. Orbital still is working on its Taurus rocket. The EELV program (Atlas and Delta) are still pushing strong in the commercial market. If the first Falcon 9 flight fails, it will not be the end all be all of either Obama's current NASA vision, nor America's role in the space program. So please, keep the hyperbole out of the damned summaries guys.
I totally agree. I'm a huge fan of SpaceX and have a lot of hope for them, but even if they suddenly disappeared into the ubiquitous ether the new NASA plan would still be going strong. As you mentioned, there's quite a few other companies getting fixed-price milestone-based funding from NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft for crew. A quick summary:
Launch vehicles: * SpaceX Falcon 9 (vehicle mentioned in summary): medium development risk, low-cost * Lockheed/ULA Atlas V: low-risk (development risk, that is), high cost, but still drastically lower cost than Space Shuttle or Constellation (has been operating for a number of years now, with all 20 launches so far successful) * Boeing/ULA Delta IV Heavy: low-risk, high cost (could potentially lift Orion spacecraft) * Orbital Taurus II: medium-risk, medium-cost, although probably better suited for cargo than crew
Spacecraft (potentially launched on a variety of different launch vehicles): * SpaceX Dragon: capsule is pretty much ready, with a number of test articles, but the development "long pole" is a to-be-developed launch escape system * Boeing/Bigelow capsule: sometimes termed the "Orion Lite", Bigelow's also interested in this as a way to get to his private space station modules * Blue Origin: composite capsule, also designing a novel push-based (instead of the traditional tractor-based) escape system adaptable to other capsules * Sierra Nevada/SpaceDev Dream Chaser: more novel design, using a lifting-body based on the well-tested HL-20; this sort of design provides a gentler reentry from LEO (and potentially upgrades well to lunar/Lagrangian return); the company has already spent at least $10M of its own funds developing the design and building test articles * Orbital Cygnus: optimized for cargo deliveries to ISS, but can potentially be extended to crew
It's also worth noting that Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are all being funded on CCDev contracts (in addition to a certain amount of private funding, which they're all required to have). With these contracts, they only get the full payment if they meet all of their pre-determined milestones (building test articles, performing tests, etc.) by September of 2010. IMHO, this September is when we'll get a better idea of which companies will be competing for crew/cargo delivery in the future, and
A different news writeup (the actual paper isn't available yet on PNAS, not even online) says millions of compounds, including 70 different amino acids. It'll be interesting as details unfold.
High molecular diversity of extraterrestrial organic matter in Murchison meteorite revealed 40 years after its fall
Numerous descriptions of organic molecules present in the Murchison meteorite have improved our understanding of the early interstellar chemistry that operated at or just before the birth of our solar system. However, all molecular analyses were so far targeted toward selected classes of compounds with a particular emphasis on biologically active components in the context of prebiotic chemistry. Here we demonstrate that a nontargeted ultrahigh-resolution molecular analysis of the solvent-accessible organic fraction of Murchison extracted under mild conditions allows one to extend its indigenous chemical diversity to tens of thousands of different molecular compositions and likely millions of diverse structures. This molecular complexity, which provides hints on heteroatoms chronological assembly, suggests that the extraterrestrial chemodiversity is high compared to terrestrial relevant biological- and biogeochemical-driven chemical space.
Over at the WSJ, Peter Diamandis makes a case for private space, while naysayer Taylor Dinerman says he's seen this movie before, and argues the private sector simply is not up for the job.
Clark Lindsay over at Space Transport News has a really good rebuttal of Taylor Dinerman's piece:
Some notes: * At the start he includes "traditional aerospace companies" yet never mentions that the EELVs will be in the competition for the crew transport competition. Of course, mentioning such companies and the existence of such proven vehicles would refute his whole argument that private companies cannot build vehicles capable of launching crews.
* The DC-X program, which was initially a DOD program, epitomized extreme low cost, highly productive X project style development with a small team. Yet he somehow puts it and Constellation into the same category simply because they were both canceled.
* Gee, if we just keep spending billions and billions and billions on Constellation, in a couple of decades it will be a roaring success like the ISS.
* It was predicted by many people from the start that the Constellation program was not sustainable over multiple administrations and over the ups and downs in the economy. The lesson is not to start programs that are stupendously expensive and don't provide any path to lower costs.
Without an active maned launch program I fear the United States will quickly loose our position of technical and scientific leadership.
This is precisely why NASA's new plan boosts the funding for US manned space launch. It's just that the funding is for already-existing commercial rockets, instead of trying to continue NASA's failed in-house project to build brand-new rockets.
I guess the US will be exporting space exploration to China now as well.
What's funny is that China announced lunar exploration plans which would involve them having to build new rockets with the same capabilities as the US's already-existing medium-lift commercial EELVs. What's particularly funny is that much of the supposed rationale for the now-cancelled Constellation program is that lunar exploration was supposed to be impossible with such rockets; this was total BS of course, but it was the primary validation for why NASA apparently had to develop brand-new rockets instead of using the already-existing commercial rockets.
I don't know the specifics of this case, but if it was designed by Lockheed Martin on a government contract, that's not an indication that it would have been feasible to do so in the private sector.
One critical point is that the development contract with Lockheed Martin for the Atlas V was a fixed-price contract, rather than the cost-plus contracts typically used in government procurement. This means that Lockheed Martin actually had an incentive to keep development costs low, as they don't automatically make a profit by being slow and inefficient. I'm fairly certain that Lockheed Martin also provided much of the development money themselves -- government funding may have actually been the minority of total funding.
The article submitter, Mark Whittington, is pretty well known on various space blogs for distorting the facts (to put it lightly) when it comes to space policy. Unfortunately, this submission is no exception. Here's a line-by-line of his summary:
"The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit
So far true, although there are other parts of the proposal.
while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO,
This is just plain incorrect. It cancels one particular program, which was widely regarded as badly mismanaged and possessing many inherent problems. The Constellation/Ares program also suppressed any research into technologies which weren't seen as immediately relevant to the specific lunar return scheme the former NASA administrator had in mind, with several perfectly good programs getting canceled to pay for the increasingly overbudget and behind schedule Constellation program. It replaces it with a plan initially focused on developing the technologies critical for sustainable exploration of Mars and the rest of the inner solar system.
has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives.
Well, it's sparked a civil war between those conservative who either have a financial interest in the status quo or are stuck in a cold war-style lust for repeating Apollo. Other conservatives though, such as former House speaker (and National Space Society board member) Newt Gringrich, and former House Science & Technology committee chair Robert S. Walker, have enthusiastically endorsed NASA's new plan, and consider it one of the few positive things to come out of the Obama administration.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
Uh, strawman much? This isn't a "retreat from the high frontier" -- NASA's getting a significant budget increase, and the new plan is much better suited for engaging in meaningful space exploration than the old one could ever have, even if it hadn't been going drastically overbudget.
Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as 'unworkable' or 'unsustainable.'"
They denigrate it as 'unworkable' and 'unsustainable' because it quite simply was. It had already spent $9 billion just to try to produce yet another medium-lift rocket (the US has had at least two medium-lift rockets already in regular operation for many years now), which only passed its preliminary design review several years late through some fairly blatant bending of the readiness/safety criteria. Independent analysis by the Augustine Committee found that the current program wouldn't even produce its medium-lift booster until 2017-2019, and wouldn't produce a lunar landing until sometime in the late 2030s. At that point all you'd have is an Apollo repeat without any new technological capabilities, since the plan was specifically devised to avoid any new tech development.
That seems pretty much by definition 'unworkable' and 'unsustainable.' NASA's new plan is far superior by pretty much any possible metric, with the possible exception of not delivering as much money in the short-term to Alabama.
So, without the new Constellation Program, we're looking at what, fifteen years before the US has manned spaceflight capability again?
Incorrect. With the Constellation program, the estimated time to completion was 7-9 years. With the new commercial LEO crew access program, with Boeing, SpaceX, ULA, and Sierra Nevada, the time to develop manned spaceflight capability ranges from 3-5 years, depending on the company, after which we'll have multiple redundant ways to get to orbit instead of just one. Their time and cost estimates are much lower because they're using rockets which already exist (and in the case of Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and ULA, will be using rockets which have dozens of consecutive successful launches already). Also, they only get paid if they meet preset milestones, unlike Constellation which paid its contractors regardless of how much they were screwing up.
I suspect you probably already know about this, but it looks like CAM is one of the things the newly-announced initiative for NASA is looking to bring back:
$183 million to extend operations of the ISS past its previously planned retirement date of 2016. NASA will deploy new research facilities to conduct scientific research and test technologies in space. New capabilities could include a centrifuge to support research into human physiology, inflatable space habitats, and a program to continuously upgrade Space Station capabilities.
Sure, the international cooperation on the ISS was done pretty suboptimally (e.g. over-reliance on the delay-prone and costly Space Shuttle), but there's still something really inspirational about a European-built observatory module being launched on an American rocket, so that astronauts can (among other things) effectively control a Canada-built robotic construction arm, powered by US and Russian solar panels. Also, the robotic Canadarm and Cupola will be used to install the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in a few months, one of the space station's most promising scientific instruments.
Some thoughts after watching the press conference which announced the winners and reading up about the companies:
Sierra Nevada ($20 million): Their in-progress Dream Chaser reusable lifting-body spacecraft is really interesting, derived from NASA's HL-20 personnel launch system tested in the early 90s. It's a pretty well-understood design, with nice features like reusability, being able to land, low operations costs, and the capability to launch on a medium-lift rocket.
Boeing ($18 million): For developing a capsule with Bigelow Aerospace to launch on a variety of existing rockets. During the press conference they mentioned that they're not only interested in delivering crew to both the ISS, but also the forthcoming market of Bigelow Aerospace's private space stations. The design will probably benefit from some of the work Boeing did 5 years ago for their Constellation/Orion proposal.
United Launch Alliance ($6.7 million): for an emergency detection system (needed for human-rating their existing rockets). Many of the proposals are planning on using the ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, so this is an important step towards man-rating them. The Atlas V is already designed with these sorts of emergency detection systems in mind, although it might be trickier for the Delta IV.
Blue Origin ($3.7 million): for developing a novel 'pusher' launch escape system and testing a crew module made of composite materials. The launch escape system is particularly interesting, as that's the main component which still needs to be developed for most of the other proposals. If Blue Origin makes a pusher-style system which can be sold to the manufacturers of other capsules, that could help bring those spacecraft online faster, and also give Blue Origin experience for making their own designs better. A SpaceX Dragon with a launch escape system built by Blue Origin would be pretty awesome.
Paragon Space Systems ($1.4 million): to build and demonstrate a turn-key air vitalization system. By turn-key, they mean a life support air vitalization system which could work on just about any spacecraft, an obvious boon.
Also, SpaceX and Orbital are still being funded for the (currently larger) contracts to deliver cargo to the ISS, which may be expanded to include crew transportation. They also stated during the press conference that other companies than these seven will likely be recipients in the future. Future contracts will be competitively awarded based on how well the companies perform (rather than which congressional district they're in, which is the status quo) and NASA's goal of achieving safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to orbit.
For the curious, I wrote up a summary of the press conference here.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon.
You seem to have a common misconception: NASA only cancelled Constellation, which was a horribly overbudget and behind schedule program designed to build two new rockets which wouldn't have been able to take people to the Moon until sometime in the late 2030s. The newly announced program boosts NASA's budget, and places an emphasis on lowering the cost of spaceflight to LEO and building the technologies needed for sustainable beyond-Earth exploration.
In situ resource utilization (e.g. lunar ice extraction) is one of the new technologies emphasized in the new plans. The old Constellation plans largely defunded this kind of research, as the funds were needed to help prevent the rocket building from getting further behind schedule. The new plans call for a near-term in-space resource extraction demonstrator:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
Flagship Technology Demonstrations
Projects selected as in-space, flagship demonstrations will be significant in scale, and offer high potential to demonstrate new capability and reduce the cost of future exploration missions. These missions will demonstrate such critical technologies as in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, and other next generation capabilities key to sustainably exploring deep space.
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate several Flagship Technology Demonstrators, each with an expected lifecycle cost in the $400 million to $1 billion range, over a lifetime of five years or less, with the first flying no later than 2014. In pursuit of these goals, international, commercial, and other government agency partners will be actively pursued as integrated team members where appropriate. ...
In FY 2011, NASA will initiate demonstration projects in the areas of in situ resource utilization (ISRU), autonomous precision landing and hazard avoidance, and advanced in-space propulsion, leading to demonstrations on either robotic precursor or flagship missions.
In Situ Resource Utilization: NASA will fund research in a variety of ISRU activities aimed at using lunar, asteroidal, and Martian materials to produce oxygen and extract water from ice reservoirs. A flight experiment to demonstrate lunar resource prospecting, characterization, and extraction will be considered for testing on a future Flagship Technology Demonstration or robotic precursor exploration mission. Concepts to produce fuel, oxygen, and water from the Martian atmosphere and from subsurface ice will also be explored.
NASA's plans also call for propellant depots in low-Earth orbit, and likely EML-1, a Lagrange point which allows relatively easy access to the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids, and Mars. Once lunar ice extraction is demonstrated and an EML-1 propellant depot is established, a natural progression is to have automated processing plants on the Moon produce H2 and O2 fuel from lunar ice, which can then get shipped up to the EML-1 depot making access to the inner solar system much easier. The old plan suppressed this sort of research in favor of in-house rocket-building, while the new plan enables sustainable space exploration.
Uh-oh. Anyone else just get serious Shuttle deja-vu? Though Constellation looked like crap to me too, but... well... isn't 'flagship technology demonstration' what the Shuttle could be charitably described as?
The Shuttle showed us is that it's a bad idea for a single vehicle to be BOTH your flagship technology demonstrator AND your sole operational vehicle. The new plan is to have many competing operational vehicles, while also doing flagship demonstrators. Also, the "flagship demonstrators" aren't space vehicles, but things like propellant depots, in-situ resource utilization, etc.
The X-37 is a terrific alternative to Orion - if we want to launch midgets. Get a clue.
Who said anything about replacing Orion with the X-37? It's a technology testbed, not an operational crewed spacecraft.
Project Dynasoar was nearly complete when they canceled it. It is probably they way we should have been going into LEO.
Coincidentally, the Air Force is getting ready to launch a vehicle to orbit which could be considered in many ways a spiritual successor to Dyna-Soar. I submitted an article about it yesterday (unfortunately rejected, but that's the way it goes sometimes), and have pasted the text below for the curious:
Air Force Spaceplane Preps For Launch
The US Air Force is currently preparing for the launch of the secretive X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) spaceplane; NASA had previously dropped the project in 2004 so it could devote more funds to the Constellation project. The reusable spaceplane is set to launch in April on top of a commercial Atlas V rocket, orbit for up to 270 days while testing a number of new technologies, reenter the atmosphere, then land on auto-pilot in California. The X-37 previously conducted drop tests and autonomous landing tests using the Scaled Composites White Knight carrier aircraft.
Errr, the article is about how canceling it is going to cost about as much to finish it.
False. The cost of "finishing" Constellation is estimated to be $100-$160 billion dollars from 2010 through 2020 (on top of the $9B or so already spent), at which point it wouldn't have even accomplished a lunar landing yet -- the Apollo-style landing would be in either early 2020s or late 2030s depending on whether you spent closer to the $100B or $160B. Most of these costs are for developing the Ares I and V rockets, and the Orion capsule.
This article is about how the cancellation costs may be higher than the anticipated $2.5B, but it'll still be quite a bit lower than $100-$160 billion.
It would be quite bad for NASA to continue the Constellation project, as it miserably fails to achieve any of the goals which were set forth for in the Vision for Space Exploration; the VSE is what Constellation was ostensibly designed to fulfill. From the 2004 VSE:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/55583main_vision_space_exploration2.pdf
Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will:
* Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and
beyond;
* Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
* Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
* Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
Let's look at these original goals one by one and compare them to Constellation vs. the new plan:
Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and
beyond
Constellation was pretty much the opposite of sustained and affordable, with costs constantly increasing and an ever-slipping deadline. Not only that, but Constellation's going overbudget resulted in the cancellation of many human and robotic projects which would have contributed to making exploration sustainable and affordable.
The new plan for NASA places sustainable and affordable exploration as its primary goals, allowing us to make steady progress towards expanding into the inner solar system, with key near-term development and in-space tests of technologies like propellant depots, cost-effective access to orbit, nuclear propulsion, lightweight manned modules, in situ resource utilization (asteroid/moon mining), and nuclear electric propulsion. All of these things were unfunded under the old plan.
Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations
According to the Augustine Committee's report, Constellation wouldn't have been able to even produce the Ares I (essentially an in-house duplicate of the existing Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9 rockets) by 2017-2019, which would have only been able to transport astronauts to the ISS several years after the ISS had splashed into the ocean. They wouldn't even be able to develop a lunar lander until "well into the 2030s, if ever," or the mid-2020s if NASA got a massive funding boost.
Under the new plan, IOC for several competing commercial crew vehicles is 2014/2015. The precise plan is still being formulated, but it's likely to involve propellant depots in low-Earth orbit and the EML-1 lagrange point in this decade, which makes the Moon (and near-Earth asteroids, and Phobos, and ultimately Mars) much easier to access for both robots and humans, using already-existing rockets.
Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration;
If you read through the documents which established Constellation, innovative technologies were deliberately excluded, as they didn't want to have to re-adapt the 15/20-year program if any of those technologies worked out differently than expected. Avoiding innovative kind of makes sense for short-term projects, but for a long-term project pretty much guarantees that your end product is going to
For those of you who've watched the Senate hearing video that QuantumG linked to, there's this rather bizarre part where Sen. Vitter (R-La) made some insinuations that Bolden wasn't actually involved in the planning, but it was all supposedly done by his deputy Lori Garver. The Orlando Sentinel has some follow-up on this, with sources reporting that ATK (one of the primary contractors on the Ares I rocket) had put up the Senator to make those attacks:
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2010/02/senators-attack-on-nasa-deputy-chief-lori-garver-backfires.html
The attacks on NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver spearheaded by Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter during a hearing on Wednesday on the 2011 NASA budget have badly backfired, according to a range of sources.
Vitter accused Garver -- who was not present at the hearing -- of orchestrating the cancellation of Constellation. He also seemed to suggest that Garver was running the agency, and not Administrator Charlie Bolden. Bolden later called Vitter's comment "unfair."
Not only were administration outraged by Vitter's remarks but several female civil servants and women executives in aerospace companies who have known Garver for years felt compelled to send their complaints to senate staff Wednesday afternoon.
Several sources on the Hill, in industry and inside the Obama administration blame rocket maker ATK, the developer of the Ares I rocket first stage, for putting Vitter up to the attack. Sources say that complaints have been sent to ATK and so far there has been no response.
In the meantime, members of the Senate and the House said they were going to refrain from any further personal attacks as they move against the White House's proposed 2011 budget for the space agency.
Reader FleaPlus contributes related news about NASA's proposed funding for scientific payloads on commercial space flights, which would be a huge boon to researchers.
Well, to be more precise, it's actually the commercial suborbital flights. For the curious, here's the text of my submission the summary is referring to:
Suborbital Science Gets Boost From NASA
This past week NASA announced that it would provide $15M/year for 5 years (pending Congressional approval) for launching science payloads on commercial suborbital spacecraft, which provide a more cost-effective and productive way to perform many types of research. The announcement was made at the first Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, where a few hundred scientists and rocket builders gathered to get a better understanding of each others' needs and capabilities. In addition to space tourism flights, several companies, like John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, XCOR, and Virgin Galactic, are competing for the lucrative scientific market to fly payloads for fields like microgravity biology/chemistry, atmospheric science, astrophysics, and space technology tests.
...NASA's facility is being used for the launch of a new rocket. If it works well, NASA stands to lose funding.
Incorrect, NASA's actually getting a funding increase under the new plans.
Falcon 9 was developed with Human Ratings. The others were not. In fact, Falcon 9 may actually be the first LV designed with human launch being the biggest part of it in nearly 40 years.
Actually, when you consider that the Space Shuttle and Soyuz don't meet NASA's human-rating standards, one could potentially argue that the Falcon 9 will be the first human-rated rocket in the history of mankind. ;)
Not only does it include the delivery vehicle (Dragon); but, the delivery vehicle is a pressurized cargo container that is rated to be safe for humans to enter and certified to autodock with the ISS... or will be once they're done certifying it.
Not only that, but NASA apparently insisted on a brand-new Dragon for each and every delivery, which increases the price quite a bit. SpaceX said "sure, if you insist," and is reusing each of the ISS cargo Dragons afterwards as DragonLabs.
Too bad they were not ready for launch 10 years ago. They could have called it the Millennium Falcon.
I think he's alluded in past interviews that the Millennium Falcon was one of the reasons he chose the name. He's also stated future plans for developing a "BFR" (Big F'ing Rocket) and "BFE" (Big F'ing Engine), a pretty obvious reference to the BFG. This seems to provide some pretty obvious proof that Elon Musk is a huge dork.
...is a friggin' sensationalist claim that has no place in science reporting, either on a primary site or on a news aggregation site. Should the first Falcon 9 fail, they will learn from it and launch better designs in the future. Orbital still is working on its Taurus rocket. The EELV program (Atlas and Delta) are still pushing strong in the commercial market. If the first Falcon 9 flight fails, it will not be the end all be all of either Obama's current NASA vision, nor America's role in the space program. So please, keep the hyperbole out of the damned summaries guys.
I totally agree. I'm a huge fan of SpaceX and have a lot of hope for them, but even if they suddenly disappeared into the ubiquitous ether the new NASA plan would still be going strong. As you mentioned, there's quite a few other companies getting fixed-price milestone-based funding from NASA to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft for crew. A quick summary:
Launch vehicles:
* SpaceX Falcon 9 (vehicle mentioned in summary): medium development risk, low-cost
* Lockheed/ULA Atlas V: low-risk (development risk, that is), high cost, but still drastically lower cost than Space Shuttle or Constellation (has been operating for a number of years now, with all 20 launches so far successful)
* Boeing/ULA Delta IV Heavy: low-risk, high cost (could potentially lift Orion spacecraft)
* Orbital Taurus II: medium-risk, medium-cost, although probably better suited for cargo than crew
Spacecraft (potentially launched on a variety of different launch vehicles):
* SpaceX Dragon: capsule is pretty much ready, with a number of test articles, but the development "long pole" is a to-be-developed launch escape system
* Boeing/Bigelow capsule: sometimes termed the "Orion Lite", Bigelow's also interested in this as a way to get to his private space station modules
* Blue Origin: composite capsule, also designing a novel push-based (instead of the traditional tractor-based) escape system adaptable to other capsules
* Sierra Nevada/SpaceDev Dream Chaser: more novel design, using a lifting-body based on the well-tested HL-20; this sort of design provides a gentler reentry from LEO (and potentially upgrades well to lunar/Lagrangian return); the company has already spent at least $10M of its own funds developing the design and building test articles
* Orbital Cygnus: optimized for cargo deliveries to ISS, but can potentially be extended to crew
It's also worth noting that Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are all being funded on CCDev contracts (in addition to a certain amount of private funding, which they're all required to have). With these contracts, they only get the full payment if they meet all of their pre-determined milestones (building test articles, performing tests, etc.) by September of 2010. IMHO, this September is when we'll get a better idea of which companies will be competing for crew/cargo delivery in the future, and
A different news writeup (the actual paper isn't available yet on PNAS, not even online) says millions of compounds, including 70 different amino acids. It'll be interesting as details unfold.
The abstract is up now:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/12/0912157107.abstract
High molecular diversity of extraterrestrial organic matter in Murchison meteorite revealed 40 years after its fall
Numerous descriptions of organic molecules present in the Murchison meteorite have improved our understanding of the early interstellar chemistry that operated at or just before the birth of our solar system. However, all molecular analyses were so far targeted toward selected classes of compounds with a particular emphasis on biologically active components in the context of prebiotic chemistry. Here we demonstrate that a nontargeted ultrahigh-resolution molecular analysis of the solvent-accessible organic fraction of Murchison extracted under mild conditions allows one to extend its indigenous chemical diversity to tens of thousands of different molecular compositions and likely millions of diverse structures. This molecular complexity, which provides hints on heteroatoms chronological assembly, suggests that the extraterrestrial chemodiversity is high compared to terrestrial relevant biological- and biogeochemical-driven chemical space.
This is coming from the guy who's "summaries" are usually blatently anti-CxP
Can you point out any part of my summary where I distorted the truth? I guess one could argue that reality has an anti-CxP bias...
Over at the WSJ, Peter Diamandis makes a case for private space, while naysayer Taylor Dinerman says he's seen this movie before, and argues the private sector simply is not up for the job.
Clark Lindsay over at Space Transport News has a really good rebuttal of Taylor Dinerman's piece:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=18623
Some notes:
* At the start he includes "traditional aerospace companies" yet never mentions that the EELVs will be in the competition for the crew transport competition. Of course, mentioning such companies and the existence of such proven vehicles would refute his whole argument that private companies cannot build vehicles capable of launching crews.
* The DC-X program, which was initially a DOD program, epitomized extreme low cost, highly productive X project style development with a small team. Yet he somehow puts it and Constellation into the same category simply because they were both canceled.
* Gee, if we just keep spending billions and billions and billions on Constellation, in a couple of decades it will be a roaring success like the ISS.
* It was predicted by many people from the start that the Constellation program was not sustainable over multiple administrations and over the ups and downs in the economy. The lesson is not to start programs that are stupendously expensive and don't provide any path to lower costs.
Without an active maned launch program I fear the United States will quickly loose our position of technical and scientific leadership.
This is precisely why NASA's new plan boosts the funding for US manned space launch. It's just that the funding is for already-existing commercial rockets, instead of trying to continue NASA's failed in-house project to build brand-new rockets.
I guess the US will be exporting space exploration to China now as well.
What's funny is that China announced lunar exploration plans which would involve them having to build new rockets with the same capabilities as the US's already-existing medium-lift commercial EELVs. What's particularly funny is that much of the supposed rationale for the now-cancelled Constellation program is that lunar exploration was supposed to be impossible with such rockets; this was total BS of course, but it was the primary validation for why NASA apparently had to develop brand-new rockets instead of using the already-existing commercial rockets.
I don't know the specifics of this case, but if it was designed by Lockheed Martin on a government contract, that's not an indication that it would have been feasible to do so in the private sector.
One critical point is that the development contract with Lockheed Martin for the Atlas V was a fixed-price contract, rather than the cost-plus contracts typically used in government procurement. This means that Lockheed Martin actually had an incentive to keep development costs low, as they don't automatically make a profit by being slow and inefficient. I'm fairly certain that Lockheed Martin also provided much of the development money themselves -- government funding may have actually been the minority of total funding.
"The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit
So far true, although there are other parts of the proposal.
while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO,
This is just plain incorrect. It cancels one particular program, which was widely regarded as badly mismanaged and possessing many inherent problems. The Constellation/Ares program also suppressed any research into technologies which weren't seen as immediately relevant to the specific lunar return scheme the former NASA administrator had in mind, with several perfectly good programs getting canceled to pay for the increasingly overbudget and behind schedule Constellation program. It replaces it with a plan initially focused on developing the technologies critical for sustainable exploration of Mars and the rest of the inner solar system.
has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives.
Well, it's sparked a civil war between those conservative who either have a financial interest in the status quo or are stuck in a cold war-style lust for repeating Apollo. Other conservatives though, such as former House speaker (and National Space Society board member) Newt Gringrich, and former House Science & Technology committee chair Robert S. Walker, have enthusiastically endorsed NASA's new plan, and consider it one of the few positive things to come out of the Obama administration.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
Uh, strawman much? This isn't a "retreat from the high frontier" -- NASA's getting a significant budget increase, and the new plan is much better suited for engaging in meaningful space exploration than the old one could ever have, even if it hadn't been going drastically overbudget.
Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as 'unworkable' or 'unsustainable.'"
They denigrate it as 'unworkable' and 'unsustainable' because it quite simply was. It had already spent $9 billion just to try to produce yet another medium-lift rocket (the US has had at least two medium-lift rockets already in regular operation for many years now), which only passed its preliminary design review several years late through some fairly blatant bending of the readiness/safety criteria. Independent analysis by the Augustine Committee found that the current program wouldn't even produce its medium-lift booster until 2017-2019, and wouldn't produce a lunar landing until sometime in the late 2030s. At that point all you'd have is an Apollo repeat without any new technological capabilities, since the plan was specifically devised to avoid any new tech development. That seems pretty much by definition 'unworkable' and 'unsustainable.' NASA's new plan is far superior by pretty much any possible metric, with the possible exception of not delivering as much money in the short-term to Alabama.
Right, but these are guys that have never delivered before.
Huh? Boeing's been operating the Delta rocket family since 1960, with over 300 orbital rockets launched. The United Launch Alliance has just announced that they've launched 36 consecutive successful missions in 36 months. Never delivered before, you say?
So, without the new Constellation Program, we're looking at what, fifteen years before the US has manned spaceflight capability again?
Incorrect. With the Constellation program, the estimated time to completion was 7-9 years. With the new commercial LEO crew access program, with Boeing, SpaceX, ULA, and Sierra Nevada, the time to develop manned spaceflight capability ranges from 3-5 years, depending on the company, after which we'll have multiple redundant ways to get to orbit instead of just one. Their time and cost estimates are much lower because they're using rockets which already exist (and in the case of Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and ULA, will be using rockets which have dozens of consecutive successful launches already). Also, they only get paid if they meet preset milestones, unlike Constellation which paid its contractors regardless of how much they were screwing up.
I suspect you probably already know about this, but it looks like CAM is one of the things the newly-announced initiative for NASA is looking to bring back:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/
$183 million to extend operations of the ISS past its previously planned retirement date of 2016. NASA will deploy new research facilities to conduct scientific research and test technologies in space. New capabilities could include a centrifuge to support research into human physiology, inflatable space habitats, and a program to continuously upgrade Space Station capabilities.
Sure, the international cooperation on the ISS was done pretty suboptimally (e.g. over-reliance on the delay-prone and costly Space Shuttle), but there's still something really inspirational about a European-built observatory module being launched on an American rocket, so that astronauts can (among other things) effectively control a Canada-built robotic construction arm, powered by US and Russian solar panels. Also, the robotic Canadarm and Cupola will be used to install the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in a few months, one of the space station's most promising scientific instruments.
Some more info on the Cupola over at wiki (of course): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupola_(ISS)
Some thoughts after watching the press conference which announced the winners and reading up about the companies:
Sierra Nevada ($20 million): Their in-progress Dream Chaser reusable lifting-body spacecraft is really interesting, derived from NASA's HL-20 personnel launch system tested in the early 90s. It's a pretty well-understood design, with nice features like reusability, being able to land, low operations costs, and the capability to launch on a medium-lift rocket.
Boeing ($18 million): For developing a capsule with Bigelow Aerospace to launch on a variety of existing rockets. During the press conference they mentioned that they're not only interested in delivering crew to both the ISS, but also the forthcoming market of Bigelow Aerospace's private space stations. The design will probably benefit from some of the work Boeing did 5 years ago for their Constellation/Orion proposal.
United Launch Alliance ($6.7 million): for an emergency detection system (needed for human-rating their existing rockets). Many of the proposals are planning on using the ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, so this is an important step towards man-rating them. The Atlas V is already designed with these sorts of emergency detection systems in mind, although it might be trickier for the Delta IV.
Blue Origin ($3.7 million): for developing a novel 'pusher' launch escape system and testing a crew module made of composite materials. The launch escape system is particularly interesting, as that's the main component which still needs to be developed for most of the other proposals. If Blue Origin makes a pusher-style system which can be sold to the manufacturers of other capsules, that could help bring those spacecraft online faster, and also give Blue Origin experience for making their own designs better. A SpaceX Dragon with a launch escape system built by Blue Origin would be pretty awesome.
Paragon Space Systems ($1.4 million): to build and demonstrate a turn-key air vitalization system. By turn-key, they mean a life support air vitalization system which could work on just about any spacecraft, an obvious boon.
Also, SpaceX and Orbital are still being funded for the (currently larger) contracts to deliver cargo to the ISS, which may be expanded to include crew transportation. They also stated during the press conference that other companies than these seven will likely be recipients in the future. Future contracts will be competitively awarded based on how well the companies perform (rather than which congressional district they're in, which is the status quo) and NASA's goal of achieving safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to orbit.
For the curious, I wrote up a summary of the press conference here.